This post is the third and last post in in a series of posts (Part 1 – Part 2) on data manipulation with dlpyr. Note that the objects in the code may have been defined in earlier posts and the code in this post is in continuation with code from the earlier posts.

Although datasets can be manipulated in sophisticated ways by linking the 5 verbs of dplyr in conjunction, linking verbs together can be a bit verbose.

Creating multiple objects, especially when working on a large dataset can slow you down in your analysis. Chaining functions directly together into one line of code is difficult to read. This is sometimes called the Dagwood sandwich problem: you have too much filling (too many long arguments) between your slices of bread (parentheses). Functions and arguments get further and further apart.

The %>% operator allows you to extract the first argument of a function from the arguments list and put it in front of it, thus solving the Dagwood sandwich problem.

group_by()

group_by() defines groups within a data set. Its influence becomes clear when calling summarise() on a grouped dataset. Summarizing statistics are calculated for the different groups separately.

Combine group_by with mutate

group_by() can also be combined with mutate(). When you mutate grouped data, mutate() will calculate the new variables independently for each group. This is particularly useful when mutate() uses the rank() function, that calculates within group rankings. rank() takes a group of values and calculates the rank of each value within the group, e.g.

rank(c(21, 22, 24, 23))

has output

[1] 1 2 4 3

As with arrange(), rank() ranks values from the largest to the smallest and this behaviour can be reversed with the desc() function.

Use the same code interface to work with data no matter where it’s stored, whether in a data frame, a data table or database.

Introduction to the dplyr package and the tbl class
This post is mostly about code. If you’re interested in learning dplyr I recommend you type in the commands line by line on the R console to see first hand what’s happening.

Select and mutatedplyr provides grammar for data manipulation apart from providing data structure. The grammar is built around 5 functions (also referred to as verbs) that do the basic tasks of data manipulation.

The 5 verbs of dplyrselect – removes columns from a datasetfilter – removes rows from a datasetarrange – reorders rows in a datasetmutate – uses the data to build new columns and valuessummarize – calculates summary statistics

dplyr functions do not change the dataset. They return a new copy of the dataset to use.

To answer the simple question whether flight delays tend to shrink or grow during a flight, we can safely discard a lot of the variables of each flight. To select only the ones that matter, we can use select()

dplyr comes with a set of helper functions that can help you select variables. These functions find groups of variables to select, based on their names. Each of these works only when used inside of select()

starts_with(“X”): every name that starts with “X”

ends_with(“X”): every name that ends with “X”

contains(“X”): every name that contains “X”

matches(“X”): every name that matches “X”, where “X” can be a regular expression

num_range(“x”, 1:5): the variables named x01, x02, x03, x04 and x05

one_of(x): every name that appears in x, which should be a character vector

In order to appreciate the usefulness of dplyr, here are some comparisons between base R and dplyr

mutate() is the second of the five data manipulation functions. mutate() creates new columns which are added to a copy of the dataset.

So far we have added variables to hflights one at a time, but we can also use mutate() to add multiple variables at once.